"What used to be described as thoughtless
acts of aggression, was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find
in a party member. fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. ..anyone
who held violent opinions could be trusted...and to plot successfully was a
sign of intelligence."

Thucydides (describing the corruption of
Athens)

"This is a land where no one has an
indulgent smile for immorality or calls seducing or being seduced 'the
spirit of modern times . "

Tacitus Germani

"Art degraded, Imagination Denied, War
Cover'd the Nations."

William Blake

The craft that we call modern;

The crimes that we call new;

John Bunyan had them typed and filed

In 1682"

-Rudyard Kipling

"The world broke in two in 1922 or
thereabouts....

-Willa Cather

"I am truly horrified by modern man. Such
absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and
information, such feebleness of thought."

-Alexander Herzen (1812-70)

From the Other Shore

"We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are
ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our
relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our
experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."

-George Bernard Shaw

Man and Superman

"Modern man's besetting temptation is to
sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned
reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to
that of his immediate intuitions."

-Aldous Huxley

"We need not deny that modern doubt, like
ancient doubt, does ask deep questions; we only deny that....it gives any
deeper answers. And it is a general rule, touching what is called modern
thought, that while the questions are often really deep, the answers are
often decidedly shallow. And it is perhaps even more important to remark
that, while the questions are in a sense eternal, the answers are in every
sense ephemeral."

-G.K. Chesterton

The Well and the Shallows

"It's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical,
chattering canting age....an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and
exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't soon
look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and
flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been."

Henry James

The Bostonians (1886)

"This strange disease of modern life,

With its sick hurry, its divided aims."

-Matthew Arnold

The Scholar Gypsy

"Apart from the desire to produce
beautiful things, the leading passion of my life is hatred of modern
civilization....What shall I say concerning its mastery of and its waste of
mechanical power.....its stupendous organization for the misery of
life....was it all to end in a counting house on the top of a cinderheap?"

William Morris

"The most significant characteristic of
modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all
the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose."

-William James

"For millennia, man remained what he was
for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political
existence. In contrast modern man is an animal whose politics places his
existence as a living being in question."

-Michel Foucault

"The imbecile who sits beside us on the train
doing financial deals at the top of his voice is in reality strutting around
like a peacock with a crown of feathers and a multicolored ring around his
penis. They want everyone to know that they are decision makers in a
refrigerator manufacturing company, that they buy and sell on the stock
exchange, that they organize conferences, or that their partner has left
them. They have paid for a cell phone and the hefty bills that come with it,
to flaunt their private lives in the presence of all."

-Umbert Eco

"We live at a time when man believes
himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. He feels lost amid his own
abundance. With more means at its disposal, more knowledge, more techniques
than ever, it turns out that the world today goes the same way as the worst
of worlds that have been: it simply drifts."

-Ortega Y Gasset

"Now here, you see, it takes all the
running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere
else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

-Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking Glass

"A multitude of causes unknown to former
times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating
powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it
to a state of almost savage torpor."

-William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

"Science Finds-Industry Applies-Man
Conforms"

(Motto of the Chicago World's Fair,1933)

"The spirit of rapine and greed is the
true characteristic of the modern epoch: the poor exploit the rich, the
workers and their employers, the tenant his landlord, the company promoter
his shareholders, no less than the capitalist exploits and puts pressure on
the industrialist, the industrialist his workers, and the landlord his
tenants. And there is another way in which this antagonism is expressed, in
the matter of taxation: the poor want the rich to pay it all in the form of
sumptuary taxes, graded income-tax, estate duties, wealth taxes and taxes on
unearned income. The rich seek to cast all burden onto the poor in the form
of taxes on consumption."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Every one of the popular modern phrases and
ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond
of talking about "liberty": that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid
discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a
dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about
"education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern
man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty."
This logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be
considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral
formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not
settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it."

G.K. Chesterton

"Our present economic, social and
international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized
lovelessness."

Aldous Huxley

"I'm not delivering any news if I tell you the
world is a piece of hell for millions of people....There are always a few
who manage to find a way out, humans are capable of the best as well as the
worst, but you can't change human destiny. We live in a dark age, when
freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when
totalitarianism-the totalitarianism of multination corporations, of the
marketplace-no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is
on the rise...Orwell's '1984' is already here."

Jose Saramago (Nobel Prize Winner)

"When I was growing up good mobs of people
all around then. Now people bit wicked. My time never do little bit wrong…otherwise
get spear straight away. Now….little bit cheeky mob, Old time they would
all be dead now, Old people were hard….I frightened when young. Only few
people now, but it easy for this mob."

Big Bill Neidjie (Australian Aboriginal)

"It was not a superior quality of
happiness that distinguished the pre-Ford, pre-radio, pre-boarding school
home from our modern perches between migrations….It was confidence….that
made the great difference between then and now, a confidence that reached
down below comfort or pleasure into stability itself."

"Modern man likes to pretend that his
thinking is wide awake. But this wide awake thinking has led us into mazes
of nightmares in which torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the
mirrors of reason."

Octavio Paz

The Labyrinth of Solitude

"The fate of our times is characterized by
rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the
"disenchantment of the world." Precisely the ultimate and most
sublime values have retreated from public life either into the
transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and
personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is
intimate and not monumental."

-Max Weber (1864-1920)

"We rush through heated garbage days
With fear in morbid blood-raw eyes:
Mobs in cancerous slums….
At noon. Angled faces in twisted Patterns of survival."

Ben Okri (Nigerian Poet)

"The whole psychology of modern disquiet
is linked with the sudden confrontation with space-time."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"Despite all the vaunted technological and
economic progress of modern times, there are probably more poverty-stricken
people in the world today than there were fifty years ago."

Dr. Eugene Staley (Stanford Research Institute)

"Modern emancipation has really been a new
persecution of the Common Man. If it has emancipated anybody, it has in
rather narrow ways emancipated the Uncommon Man. It has given an eccentric
sort of liberty to some of the hobbies of the wealthy and to some of the
lunacies of those who call themselves cultured. The only thing that it has
forbidden is common sense, as it would have been understood by the common
people."

-G.K. Chesterton

"A population subjected to drastic change
is a population of misfits-unbalanced, explosive, and hungry for
action."

Eric HofferThe Ordeal of Change

"Noise, crowding, pollution, and the sheer
rush of our complex, modern society are rapidly becoming as oppressive to
many individuals as the worst kind of political dictatorship."

Thomas F. Eagleton

"Modern man has left the realm of the
unknown and the mysterious, and has settled down in the realm of the
functional. He has turned his back to the world of the foreboding and the
exulting and has welcomed the world of boredom."

Carlos Castenada

The Fire Within

"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of
blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect."

Lionel Trilling

"It cannot be denied that for a society
which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom
abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power
for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at
present it be no bigger than a man's hand."

-Arthur Stanley Eddington

New Pathways in Science

"Living in an age of advertisement, we are
perpetually disillusioned."

J.B. Priestly

"Throughout these years, the power of the
State to do evil expanded with awesome speed. its power to do good grew
slowly and ambiguously."

-Paul Johnson

Modern Times

"Pessimism in our time is infinitely more
respectable than optimism; the man who foresees peace, prosperity, and a
decline in juvenile delinquency is a negligent and vacuous fellow. The man
who foresees catastrophe has a gift of insight which ensures that he will
become a radio commentator, and Editor of Time or go to
congress."

John Kenneth Galbraith

"In all the cities of the world, it is the
same….The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a
rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who
cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness;
nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be useless
and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the
useless and uselessness of the useful, once cannot understand art. And a
country where art is not understood is a country of slave and robots."

Ionesco

"Countries like ours are full of people who
have all of the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at
times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a
hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it,
however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many
well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of
it....it aches!"

Bernard Levin

The Times (London),1968

"Our age will be known as the age of
committees."

Sir Ernest Benn

"Modern man fashioned himself for the
conquest of the external world: he had faith in machines and that faith was
justified by works. He projected the infantile dream of limitless power upon
adult society and looked forward to a time when a push button would command
food as easily as the infant’s cry brings the bottle or the breast. But
after four centuries of strenuous effort his mythic powers are still
illusory. Despite his machines he starves in the midst of plenty; despite
his knowledge of distant stars and intra-atomic worlds, the civilization he
has created has given rise to a barbarism that now has swept across the
planet. In a series of world wars and world revolutions Modern Man has in
fact been painfully committing suicide."

Lewis MumfordThe Condition of Man

"The prevailing paradigm that speed is
inherently good benefits some elements of society more than it does others,
Those who benefit most are the largest institutions and travel directly into
money and power. For most of the rest of the world, the emphasis on
acceleration is harmful. It is surely harmful for workers. It is harmful for
relationships among people. It creates anxiety. And it has very important
ramifications for the survival of diverse non-western cultures."

Jerry ManderIn the Absence of the Sacred

"It rises on a basis of crude materialism
and blind determinism built by the unconscious toil of the conquered, and
bathed in their tears and blood, like the old pagan Coliseum-a ruin washed
over by Christian centuries. It rises up monstrous, holding out before the
eyes of the deluded mob of slaves-brining bricks and pitch for its making-a
vain mirage of perfect prosperity and terrestrial felicity….But at the
same time on the glacis of the New Babel, there arise the launching ramps
for missiles, and in its storehouse the ogival nuclear weapons pile up for
the universal and total destruction to come."

Cardinal Pizzardo (Vatican 1960)

"The outstanding feature of our time is
insecurity. Epochs of this character-witness the Reformation and the French
Revolution-have always been unfavorable to reason and tolerance; they have
therefore been epochs in which dictatorship has its opportunity. And men
always feel insecure when their privileges are challenged. They are not
prepared to accept the invasion of their wonted routines. They seek to make
their private claims universal rights; and those who provide them with the
means of enforcing their claims are regarded as their saviors. The limits of
men's faith in a reason which disturbs their established expectations are
more narrow than they care to admit. Yet such disturbance always comes in an
age of economic contraction. Whenever, historically, the economic forces of
society cannot contain themselves within the political forms-as, once more,
in the Reformation and the French Revolution-we have moved into an epoch of
war and revolution."

-Harold J. Laski "The
Challenge of Our Times," Autumn 1939

"Surely we are justified in saying of our
time: If you seek the monument to our folly, look about you. In our own day
we have seen cities obliterated and ancient faiths stricken. We may well
ask, in the words of Matthew, whether we are not faced with "great tribulation,
such was not since the beginning of the world." We have for many years
moved with a brash confidence that man had achieved a position of
independence which rendered the ancient restraints needless. Now, in the
first half of the twentieth century, at the height of modern progress, we
behold unprecedented outbreaks of hared and violence; we have seen whole
nations desolated by war and turned into penal camps by their conquerors; we
find half of mankind looking upon the other half as criminal. Everywhere
occur symptoms of mass psychosis. Most portentous of all, there appear
diverging bases of value, so that our single planetary globe is mocked by
worlds of different understanding. These signs of disintegration arouse
fear, and fear leads to desperate unilateral efforts toward survival, which
only forward the process."

Richard M. Weaver

Ideas Have Consequences

" 'the modern world has been shaped by
technology. It tumbles from crisis to crisis; on all sides there are prophecies of disaster and,
indeed, visible signs of breakdown."

E.F. Schumacher

"If some great catastrophe is not
announced every morning, we feel a certain void: ‘Nothing in the paper
today,’ we sigh."

Valery

"Our thought has been ‘Let every man
look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself.’ While we
reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood
at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for
themselves."

Woodrow Wilson (First Inaugural address Mar
4,1913)

"The atom bombs are piling up in the
factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are
streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the
sun."

-George Orwell

Shooting an Elephant

"Let us admit, even if in a whisper and
only to ourselves: in this bustle of life at breakneck speed-what are
we living for?"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Anyone who does not wish to deceive
himself by systematic lies must acknowledge the agony and horror of modern
life."

T.S. Eliot

"We grow tired of everything but turning
others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their deficits."

Hazlitt

"To complain of the age we live in, to
murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive
extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest
part of mankind."

Edmund Burke

"Just because people have been saying for
generations that the good old days are gone and our present condition is
worse than anything in memory doesn’t mean it isn’t true."

David R. Slavitt

"It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to
survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to."

-Edgar Z. Friedenberg

The Vanishing Adolescent

"Modern man represses his fear of the
technical world and intoxicates himself with action, or better, with the
illusion of action."

Jacques Ellul

"There is something terribly wrong with a
culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness."

-George Steiner

"People are anxious to endorse the tenets
they consider fashionable lest they appear boorish and backward."

Ludwig Von Mises

To crush what is spiritual, moral, human-so to
speak-in man, by specializing him; to form mere wheels of the great social
machine, instead of perfect individuals; to make society and not conscience
the center of life, to enslave the soul of things, to de-personalize
man,-this is the dominant drift of our epoch."

Amiel

"A popular misconception exists that the
builders of the pyramids or the cave painters of prehistory were somehow
less intelligent that we are……This simply isn’t true-there is no
evidence that the human brain has evolved at all in the last fifty thousand
years at least. Modern people are merely benefiting from thousands of years
of accumulated knowledge and experimentation, not from increased intellect….These
ides are part of the mistaken view of history best described as Temporocentrism-the
belief that our time is the most important and represents a
"pinnacle" of achievement. The Tempororcentric view is a hangover
from nineteenth-century ideas of progress. This crude version Darwinian
evolution has led to many misinterpretations of the archeological evidence
for ancient technological and cultural achievements."

Peter James & Nick ThorpeAncient Inventions

"The amount of real leisure a society
enjoys tends to be in inverse
proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs."

E.F. Schumacher

"Every time a savage tracks his game he
employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and
deductive reasoning which, applied to other maters, would assure some
reputation as a man of science….The intellectual labor of a "good
hunter or warrior" considerably exceeds that of an ordinary
Englishman."

Thomas HuxleyCollected Essays,1907

"If Jesus Christ were to come today,
people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear
what he had to say, and make fun of it."

Thomas Carlyle

"No poetry can bloom in the arid modern
soil, the drama has died, and the patrons of art are no longer even
conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals, the ecstatic
dream, which hallowed by the presence of his God, is reproduced to bedizen a
warehouse; or the plan of an abbey, which Saint Hugh may have consecrated,
is adapted to a railway station."

Brook AdamsLaw of Civilization and Decay 1896

"The modern age can be understood as
that of an unrelenting 500-year war waged to destroy the environmental
conditions for subsistence and to replace them by commodities produced
within the frame of the new nation state. In this war against popular
cultures and their frame-work, the State was at first assisted by the
clergies of the various churches, and later by the professional and their
institutional procedures. During this war, popular cultures and vernacular
domains-areas of subsistence-were devastated on all levels. Modern history,
from the point of view of the losers in this war, still remains to be
written. The report on this war has so far reflected the belief that it
helped ‘the poor’ towards progress. It was written from the point of
view of the winners. Marxist historians are usually not less blinded to the
values that were destroyed than their bourgeois, liberal, or Christian
colleagues. Economic historians tend to start their research with categories
that reflect the foregone conclusion that scarcity, defined by mimetic
desire, is the human condition par excellence."

Ivan IllichShadow Work

The very word modern comes from a Latin
word which means "just now", to be modern means, accordingly to be
in the mode: that is fashionable-which means to discard the past as one
would discard last year’s garment, and to wear the same uniform as one’s
contemporaries……….

"We may say, therefore, that modern
technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative, useful work with hands
and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he doest not enjoy at all."

E.F. Schumacher

"Most Americans are aware that we, as a
nation, are not enjoying our material success. To scan today’s cultural
landscape is to see a burgeoning underclass, a growing army of homeless
people, and increasingly frustrated, alienated, economically hard-pressed
middle class. We see drugs, crime, violence, racism, hate crimes, mindless
massacres and children killing children. We find deteriorating cities and
crumbling infrastructures."

Norman Lear

"….all our lauded technological
progress-our very civilization- is like the axe in the hand of the
pathological criminal."

Einstein (Dec 16,1917)

"The modern world belongs to the
half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how
little they know."

William R. Inge

"Unhappiness is manifest at every level of
the national scene. From big city to the remotest rural trailer court, our
civic life is tattered and frayed. Unspeakable crimes occur in the most
ordinary places. Government can’t fulfill its most basic role in
guaranteeing the public safety. Our schools, in many cases, barely function.
The consensus of what constitutes decent behavior fractured with the social
revolutions of the 1960s, and has not been restored, Anything goes."

James Howard KunstlerHome from Nowhere*

"I am truly horrified by modern man. Such
absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such a lack of passion and
information, such feebleness of thought."

Alexander Herzen (1812-70)Thinker from the other Shore

"First, one must take into
account the deep psychic anxiety, the extraordinary prevalence of neurosis,
which make our age unique. The typical modern has the look of the hunted. He
senses that we have lost our grip upon reality. This, in turn, produces
disintegration, and disintegration leaves impossible that kind of reasonable
prediction by which men, in eras of sanity, are able to order their lives.
And the fear accompanying it unlooses the great disorganizing force of
hatred, so that states are threatened and wars ensue. Few men today feel
certain that war will not wipe out their children's inheritance; and, even
if this evil is held in abeyance, the individual does not rest easy, for he
knows that the Juggernaut technology may twist or destroy the pattern of
life he has made for himself. A creature designed to look before and after
finds that to do the latter has gone out of fashion and that to do the
former is becoming impossible."

Richard M. Weaver

Ideas Have Consequences

"It is a tribute to the peculiar
horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier
times-the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the
bourgeoisie-seem attractive by comparison"

Christopher LaschThe Culture of Narcissism

"In the society of men the truth resides
less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are
so ugly it seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer
possible if it is not a lie."

R.D. Laing (1927-89)The Politics of Experience

"The sickness of our times for me has been
just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller
and less and less important. That the romantic spirit has dried up, and
there is no shame today….We’re all getting so mean and small and petty
and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination."

Norman MailerHip, Hell , and the Navigator

"You don’t have to be old in America to
say of a world you lived in: that world is gone."

Peggy NoonanWhat I saw at the Revolution

"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world
of "admin". The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid
"dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even
in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final results.
But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and mounted) in
clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white
collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to
raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something
like the bureaucracy of a police state or the thoroughly nasty business
concern."

C.S. Lewis

"The beginning of the Atomic Age has
brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the
unknown, the fear of forces man neither channeled nor comprehend….it is
the fear of irrational death."

Norman CousinsModern Man is Obsolete (1945)

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic,
enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the "the
social," our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an
artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek, little other than
the peaceful parade of television pictures."

Jean BaudrillardCool Memories

"The modern mind is in complete disarray.
Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our
intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from
nihilism."

Albert Camus

"don’t bother about being modern.
Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot
avoid."

Salvador Dali

"This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims."

Matthew Arnold(1822-88)

"The Empire was falling, the Barbarians
were on the move….what was to be done, except to escape the age? Happy
moment, when there was still somewhere to go, when the empty places were
accessible and welcoming! We have been dispossessed of everything, even the
desert."

E.M. Cioran

"So far the twentieth century seemingly
belongs to Darwin, Marx, and Wagner."

Jacques Barzun
(and may we leave them behind. .ed)

The Century is dead; long live the Century!….the
lights flashed, crowds sang, the sirens of craft in the harbor screeched and
roared, bells pealed, bombs thundered, rockets blazed skyward, and the new
century made its triumphant entry.

Tonight when the clock strikes twelve, the
present century will have to come to an end. We look back upon it as a cycle
of time within which the achievements in science and in civilization are not
less than marvelous.

The advance of the human race during the past
one hundred years has not been equaled by the progress of man within any of
the preceding ages.

The possibilities of the future for mankind are
the subjects of hope and imagination….

On this occasion, which is one of solemnity, I
express the earnest wish that the rights of the individual man shall
continue to be regarded as sacred, and that the crowning glory of the coming
century shall be the lifting up on the burdens of the poor, the annihilation
of all misery and wrong, and that the peace and goodwill which the angels
proclaimed shall rest on contending nations as the snowflakes upon the
land."

(Thus the twentieth century was issued in by
the New York Times)

"Our century, the Twentieth, has been a
Century of horrors."

Edward Abbey
Book: Raids on the Unspeakable…by Thomas Merton

"This is perhaps the most beautiful time
in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative
possibilities by science and technology which now constitute the slave of
man-if man is not enslaved to it."

Jonas Salk

"The technology of mass production is
inherently violent, ecologically
damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and
stultifying for the human person."

-EF. Schumacher

"Ours is an age which is proud of machines
that think, and suspicious
of any man who tries to. "

Howard Mumford Jones

"In the excitement over the unfolding of
his scientific and technical
powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and
more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy
non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty or even health it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss.
The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all
other goals, no matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place. The highest goals require no justification;
all secondary goals have finally to justify themselves in
terms of the service their attainment renders to the attainment of
the highest.
This is the philosophy of materialism, and it is this philosophy-
or metaphysic-which is now being challenged by events. There has never been
a time, in any society in any part of the world, without its
sages and teachers to challenge materialism and plead for a different
order of priorities. The languages have differed, the symbols have
varied, yet the message has always been the same: "Seek ye first the
kingdom of God, and all these things (the material things which you
also need) shall be added unto you."

E.F. SchumacherSmall is Beautiful

"Sanctity is out and television is in. The
city skyline is
broken by the twisted arms of the TV aerial , not by the plain
four-armed cross of Christ. TV is only a symptom of the disease of an age
which has learned how to pull the atom to
pieces without discovering how to integrate itself. It represents the
immense technical and scientific achievements of
the few for the enjoyment of the many: the dictatorship of
a commercial technology which screams at us from every advertisement that
progress is marked by new gadgets and that
the secret of happiness is to be purchased with a washing
machine and a new soap powder."

-Lewis Mumford

"Modern man has not retained his sanity.
The sophist will cry out at this point that 'nobody knows
what sanity is. ' But while 'he' may not know it, it is
knowable up to a point, regardless of obscurantist 'science' ."

Konrad Kellen

"That is a land Where no one has an
indulgent smile for immorality or calls seducing or being seduced 'the
spirit of modern times ' . "

Tacitus Germania
(AD 133)

"For though today is always today and the
moment is always
modern, we are the only men in history who fell back upon
bragging about the mere fact that today is not yesterday.
I fear that some in the future will explain it by saying
that we had precious little else to brag about.'

G. K. Chesterton

"Modern man honors a man by calling him a
realist. This
concept has been wrought from religious prejudice. This makes .
modern times appear like a new civilization, different from
the past. "

Von Weizacker

" Also it seems very far from sure that
the Victorians did
not experience a much keener, because less frequent, sexual
pleasure than we do; and that they were not dimly aware of
this, and so chose a convention of suppression, repression
and silence to maintain the keenness of the pleasure. In a
way, by transferring to the public imagination what they left
to the private, we are the more Victorian-in the derogatory
sense of the word-century, since we have, in destroying so
much of the mystery, the difficulty, the aura of the forbidden,
destroyed also a great deal of the pleasure. Of course we
cannot measure comparative degrees of pleasure; but it may
be luckier for us than for the Victorians that we cannot."

John Fowles

" 'Our Men of that time, ' continued the
necromancer in a
grim voice, voice 'have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to
others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior
to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the
twentieth century are superior to their young. The whole thing
is an illusion being labeled Progress, and anybody who questions
it is called Mad. The March of Progress, God help them. "

The Book of Merlyn
T. H. White
Texas Press

Inequalities of status between members of the
various 'estates'
do not exclude a kind of mutual respect and genuine human intercourse.
Looking back to the "good old days" people sing
the praises of personal relations and extol the virtues of
fidelity and loyalty as opposed to the coldness and lack of
sympathy between individuals who are theoretically equal.
We have all succumbed to Nietzsche's commandment "Be Hard"--
now we are dead. Life which is love means sensitivity.

"The secret that the Victorians knew 'The one Great truth' which
our modern thought does not know and which it may possibly perish through
not knowing, is that to enjoy life means to take it seriously."

G. K. Chesterton

"Speed, it seems to me, provides the one
genuinely modern pleasure."

Aldous Huxley

"The supposed great misery of our century
is the lack of time;
our sense of that, 'not' a disinterested love of science, and
of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster
ways of doing things-as if the final act of mankind is to
grow closer not to a perfect humanity,, but to a perfect lightning
flash."

The French Lieutenants Women
John FowLes
Little, Brown and Co .Boston-Toronto

"Modern man has heard enough about guilt
and sin. He is sorely " '
beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to
know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature-how
he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother.
"

C . G . Jung

"--they dwelt anxiously among political,
economic and
moral ferments and earthquakes. Wasted a number of frightful
wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not
just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang
from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved
problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary
world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to
drive automobiles , to play difficult card games and lose themselves in
crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain,
and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the
consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason.
These people who read so many articles and
listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble
to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of
death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through
life and had no belief in tomorrow."

The Glass Bead GameHerman Hesse

"The growth of what is called the Modern
World has been, by turns , both the cause and effect of the destruction of
that old sense of universal order. "

Wendell Berry

"It is an awful satire, and an epigram on
the materialism of
our modern age , that nowadays the only use that can be made
of solitude is imposing it as a penalty, as jail. What a
difference there is between those times when, no matter how
secular materialism always was, man believed in the solitude
of the convent, when, in other words , solitude was revered
as the highest, as the destiny of Eternity-and the present
when it is detested as a curse and is used only for the
punishment of criminals. Alas, what a change. "

Soren Kierkegaard
1850

"Our age could be characterized as a
manifold experiment in
faithlessness, and if it has yet produced no effective understanding of the
practicalities of faith, it has certainly
produced massive evidence of the damage of its absence. "

Wendell BerryThe Unsettling of America

"To be merely modern is to condemn oneself
to an ultimate narrowness . "

G.K. Chesterton

"Our is a world in which knowledge
accumulates and wisdom decays. "

Aldous Huxley

"The disease of the modern character is
specialization. Looked
at from the standpoint of the social 'system' , the aim of
specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim to see that
the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering,
agriculture, education, etc. are given into the hands of the
most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not
appear until we look at specialization from the opposite
stand-point-that of the individual person. We then begin to
see the grotesquery-indeed, the impossibility-of an idea
of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of
personal wholeness. "

Wendell Berry

"Men some centuries from now will surely
look back upon our time
as a golden age of unparalleled technical, intellectual, institutional, and
perhaps even of artistic creativity. Life in Demosthenes' Athens, in
Confucius' China, and in Mohammed’s Arabia was violent, risky, and
uncertain; hopes struggled with fears; greatness teetered perilously on the
brim of disaster. We belong in this high company and should count
ourselves fortunate to live in one of the great ages of the world. "

W.H. McNeil TheRise of the West

"The axiom "you become what you
hate" is never more apparent than today. We have tried to banish from
the planet darkness and ignorance of the ages. We have heralded a new age of
discovery and civilization for mankind. We have been blowing the horn of the
golden age while reviling the dark superstition of the past, the abysmal
obscurant patterns of thought which prevented us from seeing the world as it
"really is. " One cannot help but wonder if we have not instead
embodied a greater ignorance and folly which beggars all that has preceded
it, brining a total lack of understanding that has created a howling
apocalyptic nightmare which the planetary body must now wrestle in order to
survive. "

Paul HawkenThe Magic of Findhorn

"One of the main characteristics of modern
thought is a contradiction between the way man regards the external world,
outside himself, and the way he regards the internal world, inside
himself. As regards the external world, he has never been more
objective, more convinced of the universal application of 'laws' ,
expressible by formulae and consistently measurable in their effects. In
this field, any belief which throws doubt on the principle of measurability,
for example, By any belief in intelligence or consciousness belonging to
beings greater in scale than man, is in danger of being regarded as
superstition.
As regards his internal world, on the other hand, man has rarely been more
subjective, more convinced of the special validity of his every whim,
imagination, hope and fear, and less willing to admit that his inner world
is subject to any laws whatsoever. "

Rodney CollinThe Theory of Celestial Influence

"Descartes' philosophy is haunted by two
nightmares which in a
sense became the nightmares of the whole modern
age, not be-
cause this age was so deeply influenced by
Cartesian philosophy,
but because their emergence was almost
inescapable once the
true implications of the modern world view were
understood.
These nightmares are very simple and very well
known. In the
one, reality, the reality of the world as well
as of human
life, is doubted; if neither the senses nor
common sense nor
reason can be trusted, then it may well be that
all we take
for reality is only a dream. The other concerns
the general
human condition as it was revealed by the new
discoveries and
the impossibility for man to trust his sense
and his reason;
under these circumstances it seems, indeed,
much more likely
that an evil spirit, a 'Dieu Trompeur' ,
willfully and spitefully
betrays man than that God is the ruler of the
universe. The
consummate devilry of this evil spirit would
consist in having
created a creature which harbors a notion of
truth only to be-
stow on it such other faculties that it will
never be able
to reach any truth, never be able to be certain
of anything. "

Hannah ArendtThe Human Condition

"This time, like all times, is a very good
one-if we but know
what to do with it. "

Emerson

"If you want to live an easy life, you
picked the wrong century
to be born in. "

Trotsky

"Mr Gandhi, what do you think of modern
civilization?
"That would be a good idea."

(Gandhis reply to a reporters question disembarking in Southampton in lB3O)

"Muggers attack in broad daylight.
Churches lock their doors because, as one clergyman explains, "Too many bums
come in, wander around and take what they like." Last week a purse
snatcher was shot to death by a rookie policeman; a 4O-year-old man was
beaten to death in his home with a leg wrenched by a couple of intruders
from his end table; a bank' was robbed and police pursued the bandits
through the streets while passers by scattered to escape the gunfire.. ."

Time (Mar 22,1963)a description of the capital city of the leading nation of
Western Civilization

"By the spirit of the age, then, the man
of to-day is forced into skepticism about his own thinking,
in order to make him receptive to truth which comes to him
from authority. To all this constant influence he cannot
make the resistance that is desirable because he is an
overworked and distracted being without power to
concentrate. More-over, the manifold material travails which are
his lot work upon his mentality in such a way that he
comes at last to believe himself unqualified even to
make any claim to thoughts of him own.
His self-confidence is also diminished through
the pressure exercised upon him by the huge and daily
increasing mass of Knowledge. He is no longer in a
position to take in as something which he has grasped all the
new discoveries that are constantly announced; he has to
accept them as fact although he does not understand them.
This being his relation to scientific truth he is tempted to
acquiesce in the idea that in matters of thought also his
judgment can- not be trusted. Thus do the circumstances of the age do their
best to deliver us up to the spirit of the age. The seed of skepticism has germinated. In fact,
the modern man has no longer any spiritual self-confidence
at all. Behind a self-confident exterior he conceals a
great inward lack of confidence. In spite of his great
capacity in material matters he is an altogether stunted being,
because he makes no use of his capacity for thinking. It will
ever remain incomprehensible that our generation, which has
shown itself so great by its achievements in discovery and
invention, could fall so low spiritually as to give up
thinking."

Albert SchweitzerOut of my life and thought

"Though the modern may know a million
secrets, the ancients world new one-and that one was greater than the million;
for the million secrets breed death, disaster, sorrow, selfishness,
lust, and avarice, but the one secret confers life, light, and
truth."

Manly P. Hall

"The spirit of our age dislikes what is
simple. It no longer
believes the simple can be profound...The
spirit of the age
loves dissonance, in tones, in lines, and in
thought. That
shows how far from thinking it is, for thinking
is harmony
within us."

"You turn to religion him who was born to
wear the sword, you
make a King of one who was born to preach. Thus
all your
steps are out of the true way. "

Dante

"Modern life is the silent pact to keep up
appearances."

by John Buchan
Longmans-Green & Co.

"The moderns are fond of the modern
metaphor 'You can't turn
back the clock' ,obviously you can with one
finger. Anything
being a human construction can be reconstructed
upon any plan
that has ever existed."

G.K. Chesterton

"The modern mind is forced to face the
future by a certain
sense of fatigue, not unmixed by terror with
regards to the past. "

G. K. Chesterton

"The Modern Temper. Hollow men eating
their Naked Lunches in
the Wasteland while awaiting Go out. Botched
civilization. Sick
world. Untergang des Abendlandes. No life beyond the grave. Loss of traditional
symbols of Western Culture. No integrating myths. No
worship. No reality independent of the disinterested observer. No
objective, sharable truth of truths. No scale of values. No norm of
human nature. . . No boundaries between the rational and the
irrational, normal or abnormal. Solipsism. Nothing to discipline
our emotions. No firm roots in domestic or civil ritual. Life
pattern less, purposeless, meaningless. Everything "phony"

Hoxie Neale FairchildReligious Trends in English Poetry

"What a spectacle do the nations present
today! We see a hand-
full of rich, idle and voluptuous men enjoying
themselves at
the expense of a multitude which flatters their
passions
and can only live by pandering to their
appetites. This assembly
of oppressors and oppressed constitutes what is
called Society,
from which the vilest and most miserable
elements are selected
to make soldiers."

Saxe
1756

"Now, the world' s decisions were made by
smaller men; by gray,
faceless bureaucrats without vision or wit;
committeemen who
spoke committee speak and thought committee
thought, men who know
more of dogma than destiny, men who understood
production but
were ignorant of pleasure, men more comfortable
with a file full
of papers than a fistful of gems; unsmiling
men, unmannered
men, undreaming men, men who believed they
could guide humanity
when they could not seduce a countess nor ride
a horse."

Tom RobbinsStill Life With Woodpecker

"Curious, is it not, that in modern
Western society alone
"Enlightenment" with a capital
"E" came to mean the repression
of transcendent aspiration, the destruction of
religious
experience. "

Theodore Roszack

"Is it not terrible, is it not humiliating
to suppose that Moses
climbed Mount Sinai, that the Hellenes built
their enchanting citadels, that the Romans fought their Punic Wars,
that the handsome Alexander crossed the Granicus in his plumed
helmet and fought at Arbela, that the apostles proclaimed the word
of God, that martyrs suffered, poets sang songs, painters painted,
and knights glittered at tournaments-and all this so that the French,
German, and Russian 'bourgeois' in his ugly and ridiculous attire
might enjoy the blessings of peace, "individually' or
'collectively' , on the ruins of
past greatness?...One would have to blush for
mankind if this shabby ideal of universal utility, or shallow,
commonplace work and inglorious prissiness were to triumph for
centuries."

K.N. Leontiev
(1831-1891)

"We, who detest from the depths of our
soul all Christianity,
from Jesus ' to Marx's, look with extraordinary
sympathy upon
this 'resurgence' of modern life in the pagan
cult of force
and daring. "

Mussolini, Dec. 1919

"We intend to sing the love of danger, the
habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential
ingredients of our poetry. We affirm that the world's magnificence has
been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car
whose hood is adorned by great pipes, like serpents of
explosive breath- a roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel-is
more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
We will glorify war-the world's only hygiene..
.
We will sing of great crowds excited by work,
by pleasure, an
by riot; we will sing of the multicolored,
polyphonic tides of
revolution in the modern capitals.. ."

First Futurist ManifestoLe Figaro 1909

"Multicolored billboards on the green of
the fields, iron bridges
that chain the hills together, surgical trains
that pierce the blue
belly of the mountains, enormous turbine pipes,
new muscles of the
earth, may you be praised by the Futurist
poets, since you destroy
the old sickly cooing sensitivity of the
earth."

Marinetti (the caffeine of Europe)

"The past has a tyrannical influence which
is difficult to escape-
The worst is that there is always something of
the past within us.
Fortunately, we can also enjoy modern
construction, marvels of
science, technique of all kinds, as well as
modern art. We can
enjoy real jazz and its dance; we see the
electric lights of
luxury and utility; the window displays. Even
the thought of all
this is gratifying. Then we feel the great
difference between
modern times and the past. "

Mondrian

"Today, in every domain, all forms of
imagination are rampant-
except in those spheres where our
"historical" life goes on,
stifled, unhappy and precarious, like
everything out of date.
An immense gulf separates the man of adventure
from humanity
and our societies from our civilization. We are
living with ideas
of morality, sociology, philosophy and
psychology that belong to
the nineteenth century. We are our own
great-great-grandfathers.
As we watch rockets rising to the sky and feel
the ground vibrating
with a thousand new radiations, we are
still smoking the
pipe of Thomas Braindorge. Our literature, our
philosophical discussions, our ideological conflicts, our
attitude toward reality-
all this is still slumbering behind the doors
that have been burst
open. Youth! Youth!-go forth and tell the world
that everything is
opened up and already the Outside has come
in!"

Jacques Bergier & PauwelsThe Morning of the Magicians

"In my opinion, a man who has not lived
through Hegel's phenomenology who has not passed through that furnace and
been tempered by it, is not complete, not modern. "

Herzen (about 1830)

We search for justification, explanations, try to find
ideas and truths.
Everything that surrounds us has been submitted
to the searching
eye of criticism. This is a disease that
affects all ages of
transition. Formerly it was otherwise: all
relationships, ,whether
close or distant, family or social, were
clearly defined-just or
unjust, they were defined. Hence there was no
place for lengthy
meditation; to have an easy conscience it was
enough to conform
to positive law. The whole existing order then
seemed natural,
like the circulatory and digestive systems
whose origins and
operation are hidden from our consciousness,
although they function
according to specific laws and need be
neither watched nor
understood. For every case there was a
ready-made solution;
there was nothing better than to live in
conformity with an
established pattern."

Alexander Herzen (1830) Russian Philosopher

"I do not want happiness, even as a gift,
if I cannot be
easy about the fate of all my brethren, my own
flesh and blood.
They say that there can be no harmony without
dissonance; that|
may be all very pleasant and proper for music
lovers, but certainly not for those who have been picked out
to express the
idea of dissonance by their fate...What good is
it to me to
know that reason will ultimately be victorious
and that the
future will be beautiful, if I was forced by
fate to witness
the triumph of chance, irrationality, and brute
force?"

Belinsky (about l88O)
Russian philosopher

"Let the devil take all dreams! What is
good is what is under
our nose, within reach of your hand."

Belinsky

"Modern man likes to pretend that his
thinking is wide-awake. but
"this wide-awake thinking has led us into
the mazes of a nightmare in
which the torture chambers are endlessly
repeated in the mirrors of
reason. *And when we emerge, perhaps we will
realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that -the
dreams are intolerable. and then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more
with our eyes closed."

Octavio PazThe Labyrinth of Solitude

"So read these texts, look around you With
an honest eye, and
have the courage to make a truthful. choice. To
live with
danger in these times, with the ache of
disorder in one's
bones and the bars of prison down one's
horizon, is to live with health. "

Alan LelchukAmerican Mischief

"Nowadays is, lit by lightning, a plague
has stricken
the moths , and Blanche has been 'put away' ..
.

Tennessee Williams "Memoirs

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us
are looking at the stars. "

Oscar Wilde

"Surely one of the most characteristic
phenomena of our time is the denial of asylum to those
persecuted for religious or political reasons. History has known nothing
like it. The Jews driven from Spain found shelter in the
Sultan's empire and in the Netherlands Republic; the Huguenots
fleeing France settled in the colonies of the New World, or in
the Prussian Kingdom; but 'displaced persons' are an essentially
modern phenomenon. Countries did not grant visas to
poverty-stricken German Jews, or gave them only with extreme
reluctance. In response to public opinion and following various
interventions, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States
called an international conference on July 6, 1938, at
Evian, to do some- thing about this problem. But the only result
of the Evian conference was the creation of a permanent
intergovernmental committee with headquarters in London; its
representatives regularly went to Berlin to arrange for the
financing of emigration through property requisitioned from the
Jews. But these attempts failed because the powers of the intergovernmental committee were very limited, and the
nations making it up, divided in their counsels and their
minds, did not really know what they wanted. "

Leon Poliakov
London: Elek BooksHarvest of Hate

"But there have been positive changes:
some people are
no longer angry when told that restoration must
come from with-
in. The belief that everything is 'politics'
and that radical
rearrangements of the 'system' will suffice to
save civilization
is no longer held with the same fanaticism
as it was
held 25 years ago. Everywhere in the modern
world there are
experiments in new lifestyles and voluntary
simplicity; the
arrogance of materialistic scientism is in
decline, and it is
sometimes tolerated even in polite society to
mention God."

Schumacher

"It is always the autumn of 1926, the last
Saturday in
September or the first in October, the ivy
leaves on the
stadium wall crisping to scarlet, the sun still
warm, the lucent
air all blue and gold. It is a Midwestern
university, .
the Midwestern university-mock-Gothic library
and chapel,
mock-classic classrooms, the lush
tapestry-brick veneer of
fraternity row. With the big game only hours
away, the saxophones
of the college band are giving
anticipatory blasts between the chapel and the gymnasium. Over that pied and milling campus the sunshine
is almost tangible. The sheiks wear Fair Isle sweaters
, checked plus fours with tasseled shoes, or
gray trousers
so bell-bottomed that they completely cover the
saddle-strap
shoes. Most of the sheiks are hatless, and
their hair, parted
in the middle, is lacquered with Slikum or
Staycomb to a mirrorlike
stiffness. The shebas have
close-cropped, shingled
hair. Beneath their sweaters or sheath dresses
there is only

the vaguest convexity of breast. Their knobby
knees are
topped by frilled garters, and fringed skirts
sway above the knees.
A Theta Delt is strumming 'Bye Bye Blackbird'
on his
ukelele for a covey of shebas sitting on the
library steps.
They sit with legs apart, displaying the
y-shaped pattern of
their lace panties with provocative unconcern.
A freshman,
still marked with the grotesque innocence of
Central High
School (he will shed it before spring) , passes
timidly by the
insouciant sophs and juniors, wearing a beanie
branded with
the numerals 1930. The date is, of course, part
of his absurdity
, that there will never be anything but here
and now-this
timeless moment throbbing to the beat of 'The
Varsity Drag. '
It is warm mindless and immediate.
After the game there are the ritual dances
along fraternity row. Over the fieldstone mantel of the
fraternity-house
living room stand the cabalistic Greek letters.
In the corner
the saxophones wail and bulb flashes on and off
in the interior
of the bass drum to light up a windmill or a
waterfall or a
sailboat by moonlight painted on the drumhead.
A few couples
are dancing, a few more are in the kitchen
mixing drinks, but
most are twined in each others' arms in the
convenient alcoves
or along the wide staircase as they neck with
concentrated unconcern.
After the dance there is the ride home. Some of
the
dough heavy sheiks may drive a Jordan Playboy,
with port
and starboard lights, but most settle for the
modified Model-
T, the tin lizzy touring with the top and
windshield removed
and its side covered with legends: Four
Wheels-No Brakes;
Stop me If you've heard This; Enter by Rear.
Under the trees
the last sheik parks with the last Sheba for
the last drink
and the last neck. Yet for all this hip-flasked
groping in
the moonlight, it is somehow innocent, or
almost so, and has
the poignancy of everything that is brief.
"

"Sheiks and Shebas, Dance no more"

Horizon Magazine July 1963
Francis Russell

She: Tell me, are you fond of Brahms?
He: OH, very! But I think I like shredded-wheat
biscuits even better. ....Sheiks in coonskins with hip flasks, shebas in
helmet hats carrying tapered cigarette holders.. They are models rather than
caricatures, hey-hey sayers to a life that reaches its thundering climax in
the cheering sections at the Saturday big game…

"People have now been talking long enough
about the frivolity of this age; I believe it is now high
time to talk a little about its melancholy, and I hope that by
this everything will be better clarified. Or is not melancholy
the defect of our age? Is it not this which resounds even in
its frivolous laughter? Is it not melancholy which has
deprived us of courage to command, of courage to obey,
of power to
act, of the confidence to hope?"

Soren Kierkegaard

"Our age reminds one vividly of the
dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and
yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible
spiritual bond which gives it validity no longer exists, and
so the whole age is at once comic and tragic-tragic because
it is perishing, comic because it goes on."

Soren Sierkegaard

"More and more people are beginning to
realize that the
modern experiment of living without religions
has failed. It
received its early impetus from the Cartesian
revolution, which,
with implacable logic, separated man from those
higher levels
that alone can maintain his humanity. Man
closed the gates of
heaven against himself and tried, with immense
energy and ingenuity, to confine himself to the earth. He is
now discovering that the earth is but a transitory state, so
that a refusal to reach for heaven means an involuntary descent
into hell. "

E. F. Schumacher

"The old modern age is ended. We live in a
post-modern as well as a post-Christian age.....It is post-Christian in the
sense that people no longer understand themselves, as they understood
themselves for some fifteen hundred years, as ensouled creatures under God,
born to trouble and whose salvation depends upon the entrance of God into
history as Jesus Christ.

It is post-modern because the Age
of Enlightenment with its vision of man as a rational creature, naturally
good and part of the cosmos which itself is understandable by natural
science-this age has also ended. it ended with the catastrophes of the
twentieth century."

Walker Percy

"...The Judeo-Suburban Consumer
Citadels so many of us live in grow increasingly nonsensical, even if you
happen to be one of the winners in the system. The Fossil Fuel Empire grows
ever more violent and demonic. You put busted glass and surveillance cameras
on top of the safety walls and a paid guard at the locked gate of your
Republican Golf Community, and you still get robbed silly by the insurance
scammer, the pool boy, and the guy who mows the lawn. Or every time you
misplace something, you think you're robbed. It's stupid to live this way if
you have any spiritual aspirations at all..."

-David James Duncan

God Laughs & Plays

****************

Article:" Measuring Modernity: The U.S. Is
Not Number One" by Rodger Doyle Scientific American Dec 2003

Book: "William James: In the Maelstrom of
American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson

Book: "Modern Times, Modern Places."
by Peter Conrad

Book: "Revolt against the Modern
World" by Evola

Book: "The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th
Century" by Peter Watson

Book: "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western Cultural
Life" by Jacques Barzun

Book: "Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the
Nineties" by Paul Johnson

Book: "The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 by Paul
Johnson

Book: "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack
Weatherford

Book: "American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New
Century" by Christine Stansell

Book: "Inventing Modernity" by John Lienhard

Book: "Barbed Wire: A Political History" by Olivier Razac

Book: "The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the
British Enlightenment" by Roy Porter

Book: "The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th
Century" by Peter Watson

Book: "Men, Machines, and Modern Times" by Elting E. Morison

Book: "How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of
Modern Delusions." by Francis Wheen

Book: "Twin Tracks: The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World"
by James Burke

Book: "Telegram! Modern History As Told Through More than 400 Witty,
Poignant, and Revealing Telegrams" by Linda Rosenkrantz

Book: "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack
Weatherford